Rachel Cheetham-Richard

Rachel Cheetham-Richard

Rachel is Vice President of Azavea. When she’s not trying to boss the boss around, she oversees product marketing initiatives, company branding, press relations, and human resources activities.

Rachel is originally from France. She received a Master’s in American Studies (studied the impacts of tourism on the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, PA) from the Université de Paris VII. She also received a Master’s in Education and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from American University in D.C. At American University she was involved in developing an English as a Second Language class curriculum targeted at the university’s cleaning team, which she taught for 2 semesters along with 3 of her classmates. She also worked with children with severe language disabilities.

Before joining Azavea, Rachel’s experience has mainly been focused on non-profit management, marketing, business development, and fundraising. She worked at The Wilma Theater, the Avenue of the Arts, Inc. and the French-American Chamber of Commerce. Moreover, she taught French and French current affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, American University in D.C, and at the World Bank.

Rachel is a member of Generation Appreciation Philadelphia, a network of young professionals who are committed to changing the way our generation thinks about older people and helping leaders to see Philadelphia as a lifelong community.

Rachel is an amateur photographer. However, her real geek passion is ‘language’: language acquisition, language disabilities, language rules and grammar, and linguistics. She truly gets excited talking about the subjunctive mood, the difference between a mood and a tense, or the difference between Present Perfect and Passé Composé. She used to enjoy doing phonology problems in Papago, Proto-Bantu, and Mohawk to name a few of the languages that kept her puzzled. Some of her favorite reads are from Ferdinand de Saussure, Steven Pinker, Françoise Dolto, and Noam Chomsky.